CHAPTER 7
mending ruptures
The only things that really matter in life are your relationships with other people.
—George E. Vaillant
In Triumphs of Experience, George Vaillant writes that “there are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study…. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”
We all do things—perhaps daily—that push the people we love away from us. We sneak “harmless” glances at our smartphones while playing games with our children. We forget to take thirty seconds to greet our spouse warmly when we haven’t seen her or him all day. We decline a call from our friend or grandmother because we don’t feel like mustering the energy to truly listen. This modern world we live in is full of common situations and experiences which, if not handled well, create resistance rather than ease, impairing the strength that a relationship brings us. Tiny unrepaired ruptures in our relationships drive love and connection out of our lives. I think of these behaviors as “connection dis-ease.” One small behavior doesn’t necessarily indicate that a relationship is diseased, of course, just that our precious connection with another person is experiencing friction or fray. We saw in the last chapter that our relationships have tremendous potential to make our lives easier and more joyful. But when our connections rupture a little—as all relationships do from time to time—they can cause more strain than ease. Consider this chapter your guide to preventing these ruptures—and to repairing day-to-day relationship rifts.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #1: TECHNOLOGY MISUSE
You know the feeling: You’re having a drink with an old friend, and her cell phone keeps buzzing. She’s left her thirteen-year-old daughter home alone, so she keeps checking her phone, just to make sure everything is okay. But then a text comes in from one of her colleagues who is working late on a problematic project. Your friend feels the need to answer her questions. In the end, you feel you had only half her attention. It was good to see her, but the friendship isn’t what it once was.
Or you are having dinner with your extended family, and everyone is excited that the college kids are home and wants to catch up with them. But throughout dinner, the kids can’t resist the pull of Snapchat, laughing at photos that school friends send and trying to share them before they fade. Soon, all the adults have their phones out, too, just to check what’s happening on their social media feeds or to post a picture of the college students on their Facebook page. No one really gets to catch up with the kids.
Or you’ve taken your kids to the beach on their day off from school—something you promised you’d do ages ago. Ten minutes into the outing, someone from work calls, and instead of listening to the family audiobook you’d selected for the road trip, you spend the time in the car on the phone. The kids are fine with this—they have video games to play. Once at the beach, the kids play while you try to work from your phone, caught in a snare of texts and emails. You spend the day squinting at a spreadsheet on a tiny screen instead of building castles in the sand.
In all these situations, and many others we’ve all experienced, our smartphones and laptops and tablets and all the social media they carry disrupt the very social connections they promise to create. They make us available to work 24/7, which might seem like a bonus to our relationships because now we can have our work and our family time at the beach, too—in theory. But actually, technology can damage our relationships and our work. We don’t really experience our family time, and the work we do at the beach isn’t our best. Rather than bringing us together, new technologies often create an illusion of togetherness, but without the joys, benefits, and, frankly, the challenges that real relationships bring.
Our technology addiction erodes the most important pillar of our ease—connection with others. Each time our phone dings, we get a nice hit of dopamine, a neurochemical that activates the reward system in our brain. It feels good, but it also makes us less willing to return to the much more demanding world of live conversation. Real-life friendship has a lot of benefits, but instant gratification is rarely one of them. Our live relationships can be exhausting compared to our online “friends.” At the end of the day, it is so much less taxing to text a friend than to actually call her. It is so much less draining to update our Facebook page and reap the instant satisfaction of dozens of “likes” than to share our ideas and interests with our actual neighbors. In the short run, it seems easier to connect with others through technology, but we need to be clear that this is a false ease. In the long run, these behaviors have little power, and they introduce strain into our relationships.
Sherry Turkle, an MIT sociologist and author of Alone Together, writes:
[We] avoid the vulnerability and messiness of “real” contact and intimacy while getting the sweet satisfaction of a neurochemical high from being connected digitally to more and more people. We can hide from each other, even while we are tethered together.
This hiding from others (and sometimes from our own feelings) that technology can facilitate is a pernicious poison. Fortunately, the technology itself is not at all the problem. We need only to use it differently.
THE ANTIDOTE: USE GADGETS TO FACILITATE REAL-LIFE CONNECTIONS
Turkle ends her book with a call to be more deliberate in our technology use. Technology can foster true connection, of course—Skype and Google Hangouts have been a real breakthrough for me in the way I connect with the people I work with. Deliberate technology use is about using technology strategically; for most of us, that means using it less. Here’s how:
Carve out sacred spaces to be truly present with your own feelings and the people you are with. See Chapter 5 for more about this, but the gist is to create technology-free zones and times in your life when you can pay mindful attention to what is happening in real time. Being really present with people means that when we are on the phone with them, we don’t do anything else. It means initiating real, face-to-face conversations with people, even though they can bring conflict, even though they can be tiring. When we are really present, we stop interrupting ourselves and others all the time. It might be gratifying to sneak a peek at your texts, but we don’t have to react to our devices all the time. We can command them instead of always letting them command us.
We can choose to act on our highest values rather than on our desire for gratification. The other day I was talking to my mom on the phone; she had been traveling in Cuba and I hadn’t seen or spoken with her in a while. She called in the middle of the workday, and I answered my cell phone at my desk. It was dang hard for me to stop going through my emails while she told me about her trip, so it was also difficult for me to really listen to her, even though I was just deleting promotional emails. But then I stopped myself, realizing that I was introducing dis-ease into my own life and into my connection with my mother. I also realized how annoyed I’d be if she was cleaning out her email inbox while I was telling her about a recent adventure. What hit me was that she would never do that: She values our relationship too much. She’s too interested in what I have to say. Ultimately, I changed my behavior because of my values. I stepped away from my computer with the conviction that my relationship with my mother deserved more than just 70 percent of my attention.
Spend time alone at home and in the car unconnected. Learn to tolerate the initial boredom that may come; it will pass. Go on a hike or to the beach without a cell phone. Deep down I think we all have a deep, dark terror of being alone, and that we are hardwired to stay with our clan. But when we experience our ability to turn inward—which we can do only when we find the silence and stillness of solitude—we realize that we are never really alone. We feel our innate connectedness. So we need to catch ourselves when we “slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone,” writes Turkle. “It’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely.”
But the reality (no pun intended) is that our vulnerabilities create real intimacy and draw us together, and when we avoid the messiness that real-life relationships require, we end up isolated and disconnected. So be very deliberate: Use online games, social media, and virtual realities to facilitate live connections with real people, choosing real connections and real people over fake ones. Use Facebook to deepen your connection with a faraway friend by sharing articles, photos, and videos that you think she will appreciate. Play online games with your son rather than a stranger. Use Match.com to make new connections, but then actually meet those connections live, in person, instead of constraining your relationships to online forums.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #2: BUSYNESS AND OVERWORK
Time starvation is a nearly universal complaint among working parents. We just don’t have enough time to maintain our friendships. We want to spend time with our kids when we get home from work, and we don’t have the energy to deal with the hassle of lining up a sitter on the weekends. Not to mention the complexity and logistical nightmare that scheduling with other parents can be.
If this is you, ask yourself: Is my busyness adding to my sense of connectedness, or is it preventing me from maintaining friendships and relationships with my family? For some people, busyness—long commutes and long work hours and endless time in the car driving kids to lessons and practices—leaves them little time for positive connections. Other people may be just as busy—they work and volunteer and go to their kids’ games and see their friends regularly—but their activities facilitate their friendships rather than hinder them. This type of busyness is evidence of a dynamic and connected life rather than a life that is too busy for friendship.
THE ANTIDOTE: FIND FRIENDSHIP EFFICIENCIES
I love looking for efficiencies in my relationships—things that bring ease to what is often a scheduling nightmare. I’m a big fan of “ritualized relationships”—relationships that are maintained through predictable time together. I’m in a discussion group that meets on the first Monday of every month. I have lunch with a good friend most Thursdays, and I hike every Saturday morning with another friend. My husband and I have date nights every other Saturday and every other Monday. We have dinner with my parents every other Wednesday night, and with Mark’s mom and sister’s family every other Sunday. I work out with a friend on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I get together with my whole group of best friends reliably four times a year: for a Christmas party the Saturday before Christmas in San Francisco; for our annual gratitude fest the weekend before Thanksgiving in Chico; for a three-day camping trip on Indigenous People’s Day weekend in Santa Cruz; for a five-day vacation in May.
All these “ritualized relationship” events are on “repeat” on my Google calendar. They took time and effort to establish but now are fairly automated. Does this mean I never miss a date or a lunch or a hike with a friend? Honestly, because of my travel schedule and the vagaries of life with four children, I probably miss more than I actually attend. But I also know that I see my friends lots more than I would if I didn’t already have time carved out on the calendar with them. Our full lives can make scheduling a hassle, and this tactic makes it all a heck of a lot easier.
Also in the friendship efficiencies department, many of my friendships are multi-tasking ones. I’m usually either getting some exercise or eating with my friends. And as long as we are truly present wherever we are—meaning we aren’t texting during the time we scheduled to be with our spouse, or we aren’t trying to work during an outing with our friends—the killing-two-birds-with-one-stone approach to friendship can bring efficiency and ease. We have to eat lunch anyway, so why not eat with a friend? Why not catch up with your neighbor while you walk the dogs? Why not make friends with the people you volunteer with, so that volunteering becomes built-in social time?
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #3: ENVY
We’ve all felt it: the sting of envy and jealousy, of wanting what another already has. Jealous feelings also come from a scarcity mindset (which has an evolutionary basis; scarcity was a major reality for eons), a belief that more is better and there is not enough in the world for you and me both to be successful, or wealthy, or beautiful—or whatever it is that we envy. Jealous feelings make us feel competitive and separate from others instead of connected and loving.
THE ANTIDOTE: CELEBRATE OTHER PEOPLE’S SUCCESS
First, try shifting your perspective from one of scarcity to one of sufficiency, or abundance. Do this by recognizing that there are enough resources in the world for you to have or be what you ultimately long for. For example, when we recognize success, beauty, or strength in another person, we can acknowledge that we are working toward the same thing in our own lives. Recently, a happiness expert was featured on national television, and a half dozen friends called me to share their vicarious envy. “It should be you,” they said.
“Your work is so much more substantive and practical.”
“She’s so annoying.”
“Doesn’t it drive you crazy to see her up there?”
I did what I do whenever this sort of thing happens. I take the success of other happiness experts as signs from the universe that similar success is coming to me. I can find ample evidence that there is room for the success of many happiness experts in this world. More than that, I genuinely appreciate the success I have already found, and I feel like it is enough. It is just right for me right now—I have a lot of work, and I like having as much time with my family as I do. This doesn’t mean I lack ambition or don’t want to continue to grow in my career. It just means that I feel grateful for how far I’ve already come, for friends who think so highly of my work, and for how much I’ve already achieved. I actually sometimes have to tell my friends all this out loud—because sometimes I have to remind myself, too—and allow them to laugh it off along with me.
Some of you are probably thinking, Easy for you to say, Carter. You’re a published author who’s been on TV! So what if you haven’t experienced “success” in the same way I have? Work with the small voice of jealousy in your head. What do you have that others envy? When it comes down to it, what are you grateful for in your own life?
This perspective frees us up to celebrate when other people succeed or are beautiful or strong. It’s not that I don’t feel an initial hit of envy; I’m human. But after I acknowledge how I’m feeling, I can choose to celebrate in response, to participate in another person’s happiness. This is something that one of my favorite happiness teachers, James Baraz, coauthor of Awakening Joy, calls “vicarious joy”: when our emotions mirror the expansive happiness of others. (And by the way, vicarious joy is a great way to increase the flow of positive emotions in your life, as discussed in Chapter 2.)
In our closest relationships we can choose to take this a step further and actively celebrate our loved one’s successes. Researchers have noticed that happy couples do this: They yell things like “Woo-hoo!” when their partner shares good news. We know to do this with the children in our lives, but for some reason we think that adults don’t need this kind of celebration. Wrong. One “Nicely done!” can go a long way.
There are two key pieces of advice to take away from that finding. The first is when you have good news, share it because it will make you happier. This is Savoring 101. Positive emotions are amplified when we share them with others.
The second piece of advice concerns how to respond to good news from our friends and romantic partners, and it’s a key to making our relationships happier. When a friend or spouse shares positive news with us, we don’t actually have to whoop or cheer, as my mother and I are prone to do, but we do need to respond enthusiastically. It isn’t enough to be positive and loving but not particularly emotive. It’s not enough to smile quietly and assume that our loved one knows we are glad for them. Silent support doesn’t count in this realm. Our response to good news needs to be active. We need to articulate our joy and support verbally, and maybe even demonstrate it physically with a hug or excited body language.
Enthusiastic responses—such as saying “I’m really happy for you!”—make people feel even better about the event or news they are sharing, and it puts the sharer into a better mood. Couples who make a big deal celebrating positive things in life score higher than others on intimacy and relationship satisfaction. They are also less likely to break up.
So pop open a bottle of champagne when that hard-earned promotion comes. Take a walk together to celebrate a particularly wonderful day. Jump up and down a little—and hug—when your partner reaches his or her exercise goal, commending their great effort or strategy or hard work (rather than their innate talent). They feel loved and we benefit from the connection we are nurturing; life feels just a tad easier in the wake of the shared moment.
And what about when things go wrong and the news isn’t so good? Still, be very responsive. Make sure that your friends and spouse feel understood, their abilities and opinions are valued, and you’ve made them feel cared for.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #4: DISAPPOINTMENT
We’ve all felt it: disappointment when our best friend doesn’t celebrate our success or our spouse forgets our birthday, or frustration when our children seem to take us for granted, or hurt when our lover isn’t nearly as romantic as the guy next door seems to be. We can start to feel entitled in our closest relationships—which means that we are more likely to feel disappointed or frustrated when our nearest and dearest friends and family members don’t act the way we want them to, rather than grateful when they do. This sort of disappointment can—and often does—have the opposite effect from what we are looking for: It pushes love away from us, making life feel harder.
THE ANTIDOTE: CONSCIOUSLY PRACTICE GRATITUDE (AGAIN)
My buddy Jack recently stopped by for tea to show me his wedding pictures and tell me all about his new love—a whirlwind sixty-something romance, a second great love after the death of his beloved wife of twenty-five years. My friend has written books about relationships and has actually figured out how to make a marriage great. He said something that really struck me.
“I text her several times every day,” he said, his voice emotional. “I say, ‘I love you.’ ‘You are beautiful.’ ‘And thank you.’ ”
“I’m so grateful,” he told me, “to have a new partner in my life. I feel that every day. It isn’t hard for me to find reasons that I love her, or to tell her that I find her beautiful. I’m just so grateful to have her in my life.”
Similarly, the late Lee Lipsenthal—a wonderful doctor and teacher of work-life balance—told me and some colleagues about his gratitude for his wife a few months before he passed away. “I’m so grateful for the love in my life,” he told us repeatedly. “I have had a great marriage.”
For years—maybe a decade—Lee had a very specific way of cultivating his gratitude for his wife (with whom, by the way, he didn’t always see eye to eye, so much so that he once almost left her, as he disclosed in Enjoy Every Sandwich). Every morning, he would wake up and meditate. But instead of getting out of bed, he would open his arms, and his wife would roll over onto his chest and go back to sleep. Lee would then do a forty-five-minute “gratitude meditation” with her on his chest as he thought about her and all that he appreciated about her.
Lee may or may not have expressed his gratitude out loud to his wife; I don’t know if he did. The key thing was that he cultivated his own deep feelings of gratitude for her on a daily basis. Research suggests that it is feeling gratitude for our partner—not necessarily expressing it to him or her—that predicts how satisfied we feel with our relationship and how satisfied our partner feels as well.
Let me say that again. When we cultivate feelings of gratitude toward people, we feel more satisfied with our relationships, and—amazingly—our friends and partners feel more connected to us and more satisfied with the relationship, too. We are taught to think that our feelings of love or affection or fondness are entirely dependent on the character and behavior of the other, but the truth is that we can cultivate these feelings.
This doesn’t mean that we should skip telling our partner how much we appreciate him or her: Research also suggests that expressing gratitude to a romantic partner (or a close friend or colleague) can make us feel more satisfied with the relationship and increase our sense of responsibility for our partner’s well-being. But the real takeaway, in my mind, is that simply feeling gratitude can improve our relationship.
I have to confess to something: After I talked with these two amazing men about their deep gratitude for their wives, I felt disappointed and frustrated with my husband. The subtext of my sentiment: I’m a great wife. I’m entitled to more. More would be better. What I do have isn’t enough. I did take notes about how to practice gratitude in my own relationship, but I also wanted my husband to express more gratitude for me.
Relationships are hard. People (usually unintentionally) disappoint us all the time. They forget to acknowledge us when we most need acknowledging. They forget to bring us what we need, or do what they said they were going to do. Even when unintended, it hurts our relationships nonetheless.
But what I’ve learned about gratitude’s role when we feel disappointed with another is this: Connection starts within our own self. When we consciously foster feelings of appreciation for our loved ones—whether by doing a gratitude meditation about them every morning or by deliberately focusing on specific things we love about them—our relationship is less strained by daily disappointments.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #5: PREDICTABILITY AND BOREDOM
One of the greatest things about our long-term romantic relationships is that they can provide comfort and predictability in this wild world. But let’s face it: Long-term relationships can get a little boring. Within nine to eighteen months, research suggests, 87 percent of couples lose that knee-quaking excitement they felt when they first fell madly in love. It isn’t that these relationships are bad, necessarily; they are just stale. Still edible, but not nearly as delectable as they were fresh out of the oven.
It isn’t just in our romantic relationships, either. In most aspects of our lives, we get used to the surroundings and circumstances that stay the same; researchers call this “hedonic adaptation.” What was once new and exciting—be it a lover, a new pair of shoes, a new neighborhood, or a new job—nearly always loses its luster over time.
The key word there, though, is nearly: 13 to 20 percent of people in long-term marriages successfully keep the fires of passion alive. (This doesn’t mean that 80 percent of couples are unhappy; it just means that their relationships aren’t particularly sexy or passionate.) And although we adapt to most things in life, we tend not to adapt to circumstances and situations that involve “variable, dynamic, and effortful engagement.” So we tend not to succumb to hedonic adaptation when we do things like take an engaging class or while we are learning a new sport, according to researcher Ken Sheldon, who studies the phenomenon.
All this means that the very predictability that makes our long-term relationships comforting can also make us feel bored and uninterested in our spouses—which, of course, causes disconnection and even conflict. The destructive way to deal with relationship boredom is to seek romantic excitement and novelty outside the relationship. Fortunately, there are better solutions to this common problem.
THE ANTIDOTE: SHAKE THINGS UP. MAYBE A LOT
The good news is that it’s fun to stoke the fires of your relationship. The bad news is that you’ll have to give up some of the comfort (or, if not that, the complacency) that has settled into your relationship. Here’s how:
• Make yourself vulnerable (just like you probably were on that first date!). Vulnerability can be uncomfortable because it involves, by definition, emotional exposure, uncertainty, and risk. (Remember: Vulnerability is not weakness! See Chapter 9 if you struggle with that.) Vulnerability allows trust and intimacy to develop and deepen.
A simple (if not always easy) way to make ourselves vulnerable in our relationships is to bare ourselves emotionally. What can you reveal to your long-term love that he or she doesn’t already know about you? Ask your beloved intimate questions to which you aren’t sure you know the answer. (I put a little rubber-banded pile of preprinted question cards from the TableTopics Couples game in my purse for just this purpose. My husband always rolls his eyes and resists at first, but I persist and we actually manage to talk about something other than work or the kids.)
Or do something mildly risky. Go on an adventure for your next vacation, to an unknown place that feels a little daunting. Visit a karaoke bar for your next date night, and actually sing. Try a new sport (where you risk feeling silly or uncoordinated). Do something thrilling, like ziplining or bungee-jumping.
Vulnerability works in part because it creates a similar biochemistry and physiology as when you and your beloved were first falling in love. Researchers think it is likely that we tend to conflate the high arousal induced by doing something risky with the high arousal of intense attraction. The two states feel similar. Either way, an adrenaline rush is good for a relationship that has lost momentum.
• Routinize variety. As you saw in Chapters 3 and 4, I’m a huge fan of productive routines and positive habits, and I advocate them in relationships as well, with one caveat. Your relationship habits routinely need to introduce variety, or you’ll start feeling entitled and bored. A variety habit. Think that’s an oxymoron?
It isn’t. You may have a gratitude ritual at bedtime, where you tell your love before sleep something you appreciate about them. Challenge yourself to come up with something new every day. Or perhaps you have a weekly date night. It might be cozy and comfortable to always go to the same Italian restaurant on the corner, but you’re gonna need to shake it up a little bit. Keep the date night, but always do something different. Vary the restaurant, vary the activity. Do what you’d do to impress a new date.
Even if you aren’t up for the risk of an adventure or the intensity of emotional exposure, make sure there is a little excitement in your relationship routines. When researchers have couples create lists of things that they find exciting to do (maybe skiing, or trying a new restaurant, or going to a part of the city they rarely visit), the couples who actually did something together from their list of exciting activities were more likely to agree with statements like “I feel happy when I am doing something to make my partner happy” and “I feel ‘tingling’ and have ‘an increased heartbeat’ when I think of my partner.”
• Surprise your significant other (and maybe yourself at the same time). This is no more complicated than making an effort not to be so predictable. Throw them off their game a bit by blindfolding them on the way to your date night. Similarly, a good friend and her husband trade off date-night planning, and don’t tell the other anything about the date. They might not end up doing anything outlandish, but the element of surprise makes the situation novel and exciting. Research shows that when ambiguity is introduced into something positive, the uncertainty in and of itself tends to increase our pleasure.
While you’re at it, look for unintended surprises in your significant other. You might be doing something you’ve done with her 1,001 times, but challenge yourself to find something new about the way she is doing it. Our brains are pattern finders, and they often see only what they expect to see. We find new people and situations more interesting and exciting because we don’t know yet what patterns we’ll find in their behavior (researchers call this the “lure of ambiguity”). When we find something new about a familiar person, we’ll tend to find him or her more interesting.
In romantic relationships, all these strategies can be tried in the bedroom, of course. Lovemaking is one of the most significant ways that most couples stay connected, but like the relationship itself, it can get stale over time. Shake things up in your sex life by making yourself vulnerable, taking risks, changing up your routines, and adding elements of surprise.
Finally, do these things as a way to deepen your connection and closeness in your relationship rather than to avoid conflict or rejection. When our relationship goals are positive (for example, we want to have fun) rather than negative (we’re trying to avoid a fight or prevent someone from leaving us), we tend to be much more satisfied with our relationships and feel less lonely and insecure. And there’s nothing boring about that.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #6: ANNOYANCES AND IRRITATIONS
Too often, many of us find ourselves annoyed by our nearest and dearest. Our spouses can be a nearly endless source of irritations, as can our children and co-workers. They leave their dirty laundry in the wrong places, they make too much noise, they don’t do what we want them to do when we want them to do it, and they complain or give us those looks when we are watching the TV shows that happen to fit our particular demographic and fancy.
When the people around us bug us, many of us lash out. “Turn that down!” “How many times do I have to ask you to clear your dishes!?” “Please just be quiet!” When we nag and criticize, we often create distance between ourselves and our loved ones and co-workers. We make them defensive and resentful, and often equally annoyed with us. We may not particularly like ourselves in these times, but it’s hard not to take the bait.
THE ANTIDOTE: ACCEPTANCE
Because I’m a highly sensitive person, I’m also easily irritated, and so I’ve had to develop ways of coping that don’t push the people I love the most away from me. It hasn’t been easy, and my children would definitely confirm that I’m not perfect! But it is a relief to have ways of coping that don’t involve making other people feel bad.
When someone is bugging me, my first step is always to simply focus on my breathing and my physical experience. Where am I feeling the irritation in my body? Where is the tension? Simply feeling my feet on the floor and connecting back to my physical self grounds me in the present moment.
If you have trouble feeling irritation (or emotion) in your body, try using 3-1-6 breathing: Breathe in for three slow counts, hold for one count, and then exhale deeply for six counts. Repeat this at least three times.
The key is to put the brakes on any fight-or-flight response that might be brewing due to the irritation. To this end, I make a conscious attempt to slow and deepen my breathing, look for humor in a given situation, and cultivate compassionate feelings toward myself and the target of my irritation.
Compassion comes more easily when we give others the benefit of the doubt for their irritating behavior. What is a reasonable explanation for their totally annoying conduct? Sometimes others simply have a bad habit that is proving hard to break despite their positive intentions. Other times people do irritating things because they are rushed or stressed (like kids who forget to clear their dishes before they leave for school) or worried or preoccupied with something unrelated (like the spouse who forgets to make the bed before leaving for work). In these cases, we can give them the gift of compassion and forgiveness. Stress doesn’t feel good to anyone, and most people have experienced the frustration of not being able to break a bad habit.
Sometimes our annoyance with others is actually displaced anger or irritation with ourselves. I am never so frustrated with my children’s dawdling as when I haven’t left enough time for myself. My good friend Ginger gets angriest with her husband when she feels inadequate herself. In these cases, we do best to direct the compassion toward ourselves, not necessarily as a way to feel better but because it is the most effective way to handle this sort of situation (see Chapter 10 for more about how and why to practice self-compassion).
Other times, we just need to own the irritation as a sign of our own unmet needs. I’m rarely annoyed with my family when I’m well-fed and well-rested, but when I’m hungry and tired, I tend to get what my kids call “hangry.” (As in, “Someone get Mom a snack. She’s hangry and about to make us clean our rooms.”) Mindfulness still helps here, as does self-compassion. But the main thing is that I figure out what I need in order to feel less irritable, and then make that happen.
My husband gets irritated with the kids when they sing or play games too loudly (with four kids and all their friends, our household gets very loud very quickly). In cases like this, the best policy is to embrace the imperfections of others as what makes them beautiful—while also acknowledging that whatever (and whoever) is bugging us will not last forever. This perspective is what the Japanese call wabi sabi, or the aesthetic of finding beauty in an object or a person’s flaws. In his book Wabi Sabi Simple, Richard Powell writes that wabi sabi “nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” The loud, totally unconscious singing of the kids is what makes them beautiful. It is temporary—neither their singing nor their time at home with us will last. And it is both unfinished and imperfect; their singing will improve (possibly) as they grow, but for now the children (and their singing) are works in progress.
Researchers call a similar tactic “mental subtraction.” When someone or something is irritating you, imagine your life without it. How would you feel? What would you miss? What if the kids were too anxious or unhappy to sing all the time? Or worse, what if they didn’t live with us at all? Imagining something “subtracted” from our lives tends to make us profoundly grateful that it is in our life at all, even if that same thing is a little irritating at times.
I find the wabi sabi perspective to be the ultimate form of acceptance. Acceptance is a form of surrender to what is and to the present moment that can bring us profound peace where before there was irritation. As neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness, writes:
Accepting people does not mean agreeing with them, approving of them, waiving your own rights, or downplaying their impact upon you. You can still take appropriate actions to protect or support yourself or others. Or you can simply let people be. Either way, you accept the reality of the other person. You may not like it, you may not prefer it, you may feel sad or angry about it, but at a deeper level, you are at peace with it. That alone is a blessing. And sometimes, your shift to acceptance can help things get better.
Irritations are inevitable, but they don’t need to block love from our lives. When we accept people along with all their annoying habits and behaviors, and manage our own feelings, we strengthen our connection with them.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #7: UNRESOLVED CONFLICT
Sometimes our irritation is more profound, and we experience conflicts with our friends, neighbors, family, or co-workers, many of which can be quite wounding. Often, conflict begins as criticism; criticism is destructive to relationships when we turn a specific complaint into a global one, or when we attack someone’s character (“You always forget to call! You are so self-centered!”). People who receive destructive criticism report greater anger and stress and say that they are likely to handle future disagreements with the person who criticized them by avoiding or resisting the person (rather than through collaboration and compromise). Recipients of destructive criticism also tend to set lower goals and perceive themselves as less efficacious. In other words, harsh criticism doesn’t work.
Nor is it productive to seek revenge or stuff down your hurt feelings. And avoiding conflict altogether seldom works. Given that differing opinions, conflicting needs, hurt feelings, and even nasty arguments can happen in even the closest relationships, it is critical that we adopt ways to handle conflict constructively. The news here is good: Most of the time, we have considerable choice in how we act and feel in the face of a conflict.
THE ANTIDOTE: PROBLEM-SOLVE TOGETHER
When you’re trying to resolve a conflict with someone, it can help to begin by understanding what type of problem it is. There are really only four types of conflicts:
(1) One-time, solvable problems. I think many of us bullheaded people assume that all problems are solvable. They’re not. But some are. These tend to be the types of conflicts that arise from a unique situation rather than differences in our personalities.
Say you and a co-worker disagree about a marketing strategy. This is a solvable conflict. You may disagree or even argue about it, but eventually you’ll come to a decision.
They can become workable, however. The classic example of this is the slob who is married to a neatnik. She wants the house hospital-clean; he leaves piles everywhere. Being neat is hard (and potentially unimportant) for him but easy and essential for her.
Even if he commits to putting his stuff away, she can’t turn him into a neatnik, so this is a problem that will wax and wane. His efforts to be neat will gradually fade as he gets busy or stressed or just lazy. She’ll get frustrated, and the conflict will resurface. He’ll redouble his efforts, and the conflict will fade again, and so on.
The question is not whether you can get the problem to go away completely—you can’t—but whether or not you can establish a constructive dialogue about it and make periodic headway toward solving it.
In other words, can you arrive at a workable solution, knowing that you will continue to revisit this throughout your time together? Cyclical conflicts can actually create connection and intimacy. You’ve worked together to improve a problem, and that feels good.
Other deal breakers aren’t so obvious. I have a friend who didn’t feel close to her husband except when she was very upset and let him come to her rescue. She got tired of having to be stressed-out (or freaking out) in order to feel connected to him, and she realized that this was a deal breaker for her. If they couldn’t move the problem into a different category—making it a cyclical conflict based on their personality differences—she didn’t want to be in the relationship.
Wounding problems generate frustration and hurt, they get worse over time, and they lead to feeling unloved, unaccepted, and misunderstood. These conflicts are characterized by the presence of the four things that the Gottmans have long found to predict divorce: defensiveness, contempt, criticism, and stonewalling (think of talking to a stone wall. The other person is totally disengaged).
Many people can move their wounding problems into the cyclical conflict category by learning how to fight differently (see below). When we raise our conflicts with genuine respect and appreciation, we tend to engage in radically different discussions than when we launch headlong into a fight and hope to “win” it, blaming and vilifying the other and going right for the jugular.
It’s more constructive—and less stressful—when confronting a conflict to frame it not as picking a fight but rather collaborating on a problem-solving effort. Here is the method I’ve devised using John Gottman’s research to initiate problem solving without actually starting a knock-down-drag-out.
HOW TO PICK A FIGHT (WITHOUT PICKING A FIGHT)
If you are the one with the gripe, what you’ll essentially be doing is issuing a complaint. This is very different from offering criticism. A complaint is specific to one particular situation and can be raised in such a way that doesn’t trigger fight or flight in the other person. Criticism, on the other hand, can feel like character assassination and lead to other behaviors that destroy connection: defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt.
There are three things to keep in mind when you are about to issue a complaint. Say your partner has not been pulling his or her weight in the kitchen lately, and you are starting to feel frustrated and resentful every time you find yourself cleaning up the dinner dishes while he or she watches TV.
(1) Start with an appreciation AND an “I statement.” How you begin is important. According to John Gottman, 96 percent of the time the first three minutes of a conversation can determine the fate of it all—whether or not a massive fight erupts, constructive solutions are found, or apologies are issued and accepted. Express gratitude, and then use that same “I statement” that we ask kids to use (“I felt X when you did Y because…”). The key is not to strike a match, even if you are angry.
WHAT NOT TO SAY:
“You never help me in the kitchen anymore, you lazy jerk.”
AN APPRECIATION + AN “I STATEMENT”:
“I appreciate how much time you are spending at work. I know you are putting in long hours for our family, and I’m grateful for that. I want you to be able to relax at the end of the day. But I felt angry and resentful tonight when you didn’t help me clean up the kitchen because I also want to relax.”
MAKE AN EFFORT TO:
Agree on a time to revisit the discussion later when you (and the person you are having the conflict with) are feeling more calm. Then go for a walk or do something that will help you relax and feel more centered.
CHOOSE NOT TO:
Go off into some corner to sulk or plot out your winning arguments. (I’ve been known to jot down key bullet points to make my argument airtight. This is not a good way to reduce the adrenaline coursing through my veins. It is also not a good way to collaborate.)
MAKE AN EFFORT TO:
Agree on at least some points that the other person is making. (Perhaps you agree that, yes, you are able to clean up the dinner dishes more quickly than he is, and that, yes, he did the grocery shopping this weekend and that was helpful.)
CHOOSE NOT TO:
Continue to pursue the issue after an apology has been made and a solution proposed. For example, if your spouse says, “I’m sorry, honey. You’re right, it isn’t fair that you’re doing all the work. I’m going to help you tomorrow,” one way of accepting influence is simply to accept an apology: “Thank you for your apology. I’m looking forward to your help tomorrow.”
According to Aaron Lazare, who has studied the psychology of apologies extensively, effective apologies include some or all of the following: (1) a clear and complete acknowledgment of the offense; (2) a nondefensive explanation; (3) an expression of remorse; and (4) reparation.
Say you called your husband a lazy jerk before you read this chapter and realized it would be more effective to start with an appreciation and an “I statement.” Here’s how to fix that:
First, acknowledge your offense without mentioning what you were mad about. Say, “I’m sorry I called you a lazy jerk,” not, “I’m sorry I called you a lazy jerk, but you really do nothing to help out around here anymore.” For an apology to work, the offender needs to fully confess to the crime without hemming, hawing, or making excuses.
Second, offer an explanation if you want, especially if you truly didn’t intend to hurt the other person’s feelings or if the offense isn’t likely to reoccur. If you do choose to offer an explanation, again, remember that your apology needs to include an actual confession, and anything that makes it seem like you aren’t taking responsibility for your mistakes will nullify your apology. For example, “I know it sounded like I called you a lazy jerk, but actually I meant to say hazy clerk, which is what the kids call a person who is relaxed” isn’t going to build trust in your relationship. But it could help to say, “I was annoyed and not thinking clearly, and I really regret saying that.”
Third, express remorse, guilt, or humility that recognizes why your comment might have hurt the other person. Finally, good apologies often include a reparation of some kind, either real or symbolic. Perhaps you lean in for an apologetic smooch, or offer to help with something you know he needs as a peace offering.
I know this tip seems obvious, but when we are feeling emotional, a quick resolution can feel unsatisfying or too easy. Don’t stir the pot by reminding your spouse again how they haven’t been carrying their weight, or retorting, “Yeah, well, you don’t seem that sorry.” (I say this only because I’ve been known to, um, express doubt that an apology is sincere and that tomorrow will be different. When I do that, I’m sabotaging my own efforts.)
Finally, if it is you who needs to make the apology (yes, you), know that making good apologies is both science and art. The first thing is to apologize sincerely. If we can’t be sincere about it, we shouldn’t do it at all, as insincere apologies make people angrier than if there had been no apology in the first place.
Relationships, even really good ones, are often messy, especially when we respond reactively to conflict. Key to all this is that we choose to raise the issues we have with our nearest and dearest in a conscious way, with a clear intention to resolve a problem—rather than in an effort to be right, gain moral high ground, or otherwise feel superior.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #8: HOLDING A GRUDGE
Maybe you’ve initiated problem solving as detailed above, but you’re still feeling resentful for all the years you didn’t have any help in the kitchen (or with the kids, or the marketing, or the driving, or for the mean things that were said, or the ill will that was implied. The list of things that we can hold on to and feel angry about is truly endless. It’s as if there’s a wounded scorekeeper in each of us: There she goes again).
Here’s the thing: We rob ourselves of ease when we hold on to anger rather than letting it go. We may have very good reasons for being angry and for the grudges we hold, but the inability to forgive hurts us. Often understandably, we feel angry and hostile toward the people who hurt us, and our thoughts turn to revenge (or justice). Hostility harms our health (putting us at increased risk of heart disease, for example). Wanting revenge rather than forgiveness creates more conflict with the person who hurt us, which increases our anger and anxiety.
Lingering resentment is a zero-sum game. When we hold on to negative emotions like anger, bitterness, and hatred, we block the experience of joy or gratitude.
THE ANTIDOTE: PRACTICE FORGIVENESS
Researchers find that unforgiving people tend to be hateful, angry, and hostile—making them anxious, depressed, and neurotic as well. On the other hand, forgiving people have far more ease in their lives. In a study of Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland who had lost a family member to violence, for example, participants reported a 40 percent decline in depression after practicing forgiveness.
Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves to lead happier lives. Few people fully realize the huge impact that the ability to forgive can have on their happiness. Forgiving people tend to be happier, healthier, and more empathetic. Which means that they have more positive social connections.
Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has spent decades researching and teaching about forgiveness. Luskin emphasizes that forgiveness is not about forgetting, as the adage would have us believe, but about letting go.
Forgiveness is not about erasing the original hurt; it is about choosing positive emotions over negative ones. As such, it is a decision that results in an entirely different emotional experience. Luskin has developed a program to help people learn to forgive even the most heinous acts. I’ve translated his forgiveness program here into skills we can practice to become more forgiving:
• A good first step is to develop the ability to understand your emotions and articulate them when something is bothering you. Practice this by identifying, accepting, and talking about your feelings, particularly when you are hurting. (Chapter 10 has a long section on specifically how to do this.)
• Acknowledge how awful we feel when we ruminate about how we’ve been hurt and remind ourselves of all the positive benefits of forgiveness. When we feel hurt, it can help to recognize that what we are feeling is distress coming from what we are thinking and feeling right now, not from the original offense, whether it was months or just minutes ago.
• Remember that we suffer when we demand things that life is not giving us. We can hope for things, of course, and we can work hard to get what we want. But we cannot force things to happen that are outside our control. When we expect something outside our control to happen, and then it doesn’t, we often feel hurt and wronged. Practice letting go of desire for things you have no influence over, and redirect your energy toward things you do have control over.
• Talk with someone neutral about your desire for justice, fairness, or revenge if that is holding you back. Remember that the best revenge—or the greatest justice—is a life well lived. When we focus on how we’ve been hurt, we give power to the person who hurt us because it causes us to continue hurting.
• Practice forgiving people by writing letters of forgiveness (that you may or may not decide to send). It can help to write about how you were affected by a hurt, and the bad feelings you are still experiencing. State what you wish the offender had done instead. End your letter with an explicit statement of forgiveness, understanding, and even empathy if you can muster it. For example: “I imagine that you didn’t realize that what you said would be so wounding to me, so I forgive you for hurting me in the way that you did.”
Forgiving is a tough business. It takes courage and resolve to let go of negative feelings when we’ve been wronged. Fortunately, this gets easier with practice—especially if we start with the small stuff—and it makes us stronger and better people.
CONNECTION DIS-EASE #9: WEALTH
Here’s something totally weird: Wealth makes it less likely that we’ll have meaningful and fulfilling relationships with others. Or, more accurately, gaining social status through wealth impairs our social and emotional intelligence, making us less interested in connecting with other people, hindering our ability to read other people’s emotions, and making us less compassionate and less generous. More than that, a series of truly brilliant studies has proven the relationship between attaining high social status and all the negative attributes I just listed is causal. When researchers manipulate people’s social status by making them feel inferior to others financially, they become more empathetic, better at reading other people’s emotions. People made to feel superior start having a harder time empathizing with others.
Sadly, financial wealth makes us more likely to act like a jerk. One of the most striking studies of this documented how people driving luxury cars were less likely to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks or to stop at stop signs at all. Their “king of the road” attitudes showed up as a lack of concern for the safety of others.
It’s ironic that social status makes us arrogant and disconnected from others. Many of us strive to be financially wealthy, thinking this will bring the lasting happiness we’ve been seeking. But if happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of our social connections, making more money is clearly not an automatic road to lasting joy.
Similarly, materialism—the pursuit of material objects such as a bigger house or nicer car or designer clothes—has been shown to damage relationships, partially because materialistic people spend more time pursuing wealth and possessions and less time with friends and family. It’s worth noting that materialism doesn’t just damage our connection to others, it also damages our self-esteem, increases our risk for depression and anxiety, and increases frequency of headaches.
THE ANTIDOTE: PAY IT FORWARD
If you are financially wealthy or have gained high social status, or if you are just a little on the materialistic side, the antidote is in the last chapter, in the section about giving. Stop thinking about yourself so much, and turn your attention to the things that really will make you happy. Realize that the stuff and experiences that money can buy may bring you a quick hit of gratification or pleasure—much like the hit of a drug—but the short-term pleasure can cost you your relationships and long-term happiness. See your wealth as a wonderful responsibility, an opportunity to be generous, and a tremendous resource for supporting your values.
Materialistic people tend to be insecure, and they look outside themselves to material possessions as a salve for their sense of inadequacy. Instead, look inside yourself for meaning, happiness, and fulfillment. What inner resources do you have that bring you contentment? Consider that your connections—to friends and family, to God and your spirituality, to nature and your community and even animals—are your most important resources. How can you nurture your connections?
Similarly, although research shows that compassion and empathy for others often arise more naturally when we are lower on the social totem pole, that doesn’t mean that we can’t consciously cultivate our desire and ability to really see and understand the people around us. If you are wealthy, be careful not to shelter yourself from the suffering that is all around you. Don’t lose sight of how you may possess power to help those less fortunate than you, and receive in return the benefits that accompany compassion. Consciously attending to the needs of others—as when we become life’s true givers—is a better route to the love we crave than the stuff that money can buy.
